Fifty
by Black Dracus
Summary: Fifty times Auron and Rikku probably should have thought of something else. Unofficial one sentence challenge.


AN: Don't own. I took the themes from someone else as well, though as i've seen the same ones throughout several fandoms i don't recall exactly who.

**#01 – Motion**

It seems that they go more quickly toward Zanarkand after she comes, that she speeds them up somehow, and Auron wants to hate her for it but he finds he can't.

**#02 – Cool**

Tidus says that Auron wears the sunglasses because he's missing an eye, but sometimes (especially after a lecture) Rikku thinks he's just a huge nerd trying to look cool.

**#03 – Young**

He doesn't realize she's only fifteen until Yuna mentions it on the Thunder Plains. Guilt chokes him into silence, and he can't sleep that night for fear of her blood on his hands.

**#04 – Last**

As he burns away into light, he's glad he restrained himself, glad he's left her to enjoy the Eternal Calm with nothing more to weep for. Sin is gone, and she should never have to look back in sorrow again, especially not for him.

**#05 – Wrong**

She thought she would want to enjoy the free drinks that they got offered in Luca after it had all ended, but when she sits down in the café, for some reason, all she can think of is _Auron_.

**#06 – Gentle**

After meeting Yuna she briefly wishes she could be more sober, that her voice wouldn't come out so loudly and that her hands would stay still, but then she sees all his edges and angles and knows that you don't have to be gentle to lead.

**#07 – One**

"Did you kill any Al Bhed when you were a monk?" she asks once when they are on watch together. He pretends not to hear her.

**#08 – Thousand**

The bag of gil astounds Auron when she drops it on the counter of the weapons shop, and when Tidus asks where she keeps it all he finds he seconds the question.

**#09 – King**

Once he would have seen her as a target—her future husband will be the leader of the Al Bhed. Now, all he can do is envy the faceless man who will somehow win her.

**#10 – Learn**

Whenever they catch a spare moment they are training, trying new techniques and attacks on fiends and (in Yuna's case) on each other. Once, Rikku even wheedled Auron into filling his pockets with items so that she could Mug him, late into the night.

**#11 - Blur**

She usually ends up next to him because the two of them charge into battle first; she never expected him to be so fast, never expected that he could make his huge blade sing and blur and bleed.

**#12 - Wait**

He knows that Rikku gets frustrated when he pulls her back, forces the party to still and listen, but she's young, and he's learned what comes when someone can't deny the call to battle.

**#13 – Change**

She doesn't realize how much she's grown up until they stop over in Kilika in the airship, and she can't stop giving, smiles and Al Bhed Potions and spare change that she steals from Auron's pocket when hers has run out.

**#14 - Command**

It's a hard party dynamic to work out, everyone in command at once and no one willing to follow; even Kimarhi voices an opinion when it comes to Yuna and her Pilgrimage, but usually Auron ends up guiding them, and he wishes someone else—Tidus, maybe—would step up.

**#15 - Hold**

"Hold this" Rikku says distractedly, and the lit flashbomb drops into his palm for the space of three heartbeats he doesn't have.

**#16 - Need**

After the ominous, stifling blanket of the Thunder Plains and the misty twilight of Macalania Forest, the battle that ended with them trapped under a mile of ice, Rikku is content to sprawl on the sand and soak up every ounce of Bikanel that she is able.

**#17 – Vision**

He tells himself that seeing her with both eyes would only make the situation worse, the feelings stronger, but such rational thoughts do nothing to ease his dissatisfaction when she walks on his left.

**#18 – Attention**

As they journey further together she finds herself trying to linger in the corner of his eye, and at night she replays the day in her head, wondering if he looked at her even once.

**#19 - Soul**

Even though Auron explains over and over that the fayth willingly chose to become aeons, Rikku still cringes a little every time Yunie summons. It just doesn't sit right with her.

**#20 - Picture**

It's exciting when they stumble across one of Jecht's forgotten spheres; Rikku and Yuna and Tidus crowd around the glow anxiously, and Rikku is dreading the day that someone asks her why she's so eager. She'll have to lie, and say she wants to see Uncle Braska.

**#21 - Fool**

She's all tricks and tangles, trying constantly to keep the spirits of the party buoyant, a self-appointed jester to Yuna's queen. Auron doesn't buy it for a second.

**#22 – Mad**

Near the end, when he can see that Rikku has noticed his interest—that she might have _responded, _might have been his-- he doesn't sleep at all, just lies awake and regrets.

**#23 - Child**

When they are hopelessly lost in the machina labyrinth of Bevelle, he is made painfully aware of her age; the stamping of her feet, the long, dramatic sighs, and the anger in her pouty voice remind him of all the reasons he is wrong to care for her so much.

**#24 - Now**

Once, Rikku wanted the weight of the world. She craved it, craved the day when finally _vydran_ would hand over the airship controls and let her get the rig underway for good. Now that she's met Auron, she's desperate to stay plain ol' Rikku Cidolphus for as long as possible—she never wants to be that tired.

**#25 - Shadow**

Al Bhed can't grow facial hair, and she thinks that the scruff was what drew her in. No matter how sharp the razor, by the end of the day, he's always sporting a shadow around his jaw, and every night by the fire Rikku wants to touch it, count the hairs, run her hands along it in the wrong direction until her palms itch and bleed.

**#26 - Goodbye**

He doesn't say it, and even though she doesn't know so at that moment, she'll spend the rest of her life waking in the night with an ache, wondering whether it hurt more that he didn't than it would have if he did.

**#27 - Hide**

Rikku skins the fiends sometimes, furs and hides that the party will later find tanned and trimmed, wrapped around weapon handles or stretched over pliant frames to make armor. Usually the rest of the group averts their eyes during the process, but they stopped complaining long ago, and she's glad.

**#28 - Fortune**

Auron decides, during his brief yet memorable sojourn in Bikanel, that the Cidolphus line must count things like machina airships and beautiful daughters as wealth, because their Home is a dump.

**#29 – Safe**

She knows the rest of the party feels most secure around Auron; even Lulu casts her eyes toward him when things get ugly. But Rikku can feel a sort of threat forming between she and him, a thick tension coiling tighter by the hour, and the strange warmth he calls up in her belly makes her uneasy.

**#30 - Ghost**

When they all learn he is Unsent, there's a silence for a few days on the subject, until one morning Rikku plops down beside him and claims his share of breakfast. It is then, watching her argue with Lulu about whether Unsent _need_ a full helping of bacon, that the last of his resistance gives way, and he loves her.

**#31 - Book**

The Al Bhed Primers bother her on a fundamental level; she doesn't understand why Tidus doesn't just _ask_, and every time Auron snatches them from his hands and tells him to focus on the task at hand, she's secretly grateful.

**#32 – Eye**

They are all beautiful; Lulu's delicate auburn, Tidus's violent blue, the odd war between light and dark in Yuna, the fireside brown of Wakka, Kimarhi's lemon yellow. Yet Rikku finds eventually that she prefers the sharp dusky steel of Auron, weighing her down with heavy regard, even over her own.

**#33 - Never**

"We'll never forget, will we?" Yuna asks across the void of space between the beds in the airship, and Rikku agrees, surprised at how many of the tears in her voice aren't for Tidus and Yuna at all.

**#34 - Sing**

The waiting in the temples is the worst part of the pilgrimage for Auron; sometimes, if he listens to the fayth sing long enough, it is his voice he hears, forever lost, but not quite gone yet.

**#35 - Sudden**

It happens more suddenly than Rikku thought it would—falling in love, that is. She only wishes that it had happened a little more suddenly, so that the man she loved would still have been around to love her back.

**#36 – Stop**

As the spell falls over her, he finds himself distracted; usually she's going too quickly for him to really _see_ her, and when Yuna arrives, he's almost sorry.

**#37 - Time**

Auron likes it best when the party lingers, when the afternoon drains slow between the banks of the Moonflow, when their evenings descend gently from the treetops of Macalania, mornings fluttering open over the Calm Lands, shaking off dew. It is in those breathless, lazy days that he can pretend time has turned back; his exhaustion slips away for brief moments in _her_ vibrant company, and he dares to consider trying to endure.

**#38 – Wash**

After a few days gone from Bikanel, all the sand has been ground and rinsed from Rikku and her clothing; it no longer tumbles from the recesses of her hair, the depths of her gloves, the hem of her shorts, and Auron finds he has a much harder time finding her once the trail has gone.

**#39 - Torn**

There is something in her that rips away when she sees her brother, left behind to beat and bleed and fade on the ice of Macalania, and the cold pushes the blood from her lips and her fingers toward her heart, Al Bhed blood, begging her to whip the speeder around and forget stupid Yevonites like Wakka and leave them to their damn Sin once and for all.

**#40 - History**

She doesn't always know what it is she's pulling from the fiends, what she's digging out of their bellies, from between their crusty claws. It's usually Auron that she sits down and sorts through the haul with, stories and facts creaking out of him, flaking to the ground like the rust and dirt they're cleaning off the items.

**#41 - Power**

As they journey further, Auron's purpose becomes more clear to him; he is to break the power the party possesses, direct it and tame it into something recognizable before they all go and do the predictable, honorable thing.

**#42 – Bother**

She bothers everyone but him at the inns, flitting from room to room asking to borrow toiletries and trinkets, searching for conversation and the occasional item left lying a little too unguarded. Auron genuinely doesn't notice that she passes him by, until one night she lingers in his doorway for an hour, babbling about Supreme Gems for his sword and how she needs to find more Amulets for her targe, all the while lifting gil after gil from his bag with her toes and thinking he doesn't see. After that, he keeps hoping she'll return; she usually does.

**#43 - God**

She's surprised at the way he walks into the temples, the way his footfalls grow more quiet, how his shoulders slump like he's letting go of weight, and his breathing gets easier. He claims to loathe Yevon, but she knows its more complicated than that.

**#44 - Wall**

He's convinced that she'll eventually tumble off the wall into the blackness below, and when the rest come out from the Farplane they'll find him alone. She seems unconcerned, however, so he simply watches, wondering how far she'll kick out her legs before it happens, and waiting to catch her when it does.

**#45 - Naked**

Auron sees her once with her hair down, clinging to her still-chubby cheeks and the graceful curve of her jaw with sweat as she distractedly repairs the airship engine late one night, he and Wakka helping her with the heavy lifting of steel plates and huge pipes. The image haunts him for days, somehow as secret and illicit as if he'd seen her naked.

**#46 - Drive**

Auron doesn't blame Cid for not letting Rikku fly the airship, even when she begs; he saw what happened to the Extractor.

**#47 - Harm**

It startles him sometimes how quick she is to harm other people, flinging around grenades (and insults) like they were made of paper and had no ability to wound. He supposes it is because she is Al Bhed; kill or be killed applies not only to fiends in her case.

**#48 - Precious**

She only deliberately touches him once; they are standing alone at the port windows of the airship, watching Spira gather, listening to the summoning song of Sin. She lays her hand on his shoulder and squeezes, and the look in his eye when he turns to her effectively ruins all her future kisses, even though all he does is walk away.

**#49 - Hunger**

There's a pain deep in her belly after Yuna Sends him, all empty and angry; at first she thinks she has gone too long without eating, but all the Cactuar Crunch her _vydran_ has on board the Airship doesn't make it go away, and it is then she begins to suspect it is another kind of longing.

**#50 - Believe**

She still refuses to go to the Farplane, but she doesn't know if she believes all those old maxims about memories and letting go of the past, no matter how many times she says them to Yuna.


End file.
